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Unformatted text preview: ‘Thou art Peter
and upon this
rock shall I
build my
church. . .'—
Norman carving
from Wen tieorlh,
Cambridgesliire. MONAS TIC
REVIVAL M A RC'H. 1036 ’ englarX)
ID eanope
1066* 4£3_ Intellectual sharpness
and an aggressive
building programme
marked the Norman
transformation of
English monasticism. Hugh Lawrence WHEN THE NORMANS ARRIVED iN
England, monasteries had long been a
feature of the social landscape.
Thirty-five houses of Benedictine
monks appear in the Domesday Sur-
vey as possessing land in the time of
Edward the Confessor, and there
existed upwards of nine nunneries.
Many of these abbeys were endowed
with greatestates. A few of them, like
Bury St Edmund’s which had been
founded by Cnut, were still relatively
young establishments in 1066; but
most of them traced their continuous
history from the monastic revival
inspired by Dunstan and Ethelwold a
century earlier. '
We do not really know much about
the observance of the abbeys and
cathedral monasteries in the last
decades of Anglo—Saxon England.
The childhood recollections of
Eadmer, the Canterbury monk who
became chaplain and biographer of St
Anselm, and Ordericus Vitalis, dis-
patched from England as a tearful
child of ten to be a monk at Saint-
Evroul, suggest an easy-going
afﬂuent life-style in some of the pre-
Conquest houses. But both men
wrote long afterwards, and their View
of the past was coloured by their
subsequent experience. The English
monasteries housed aristocratic
communities and the abbots known to
us were drawn from the high nobility.
As cult-centres of the Old English
saints, they were the foci of national
sentiment and traditionalist in their 27 HIS'I DRY TODAN interests. There are indications that
their observances were not as insular
as some have thought. At any rate,
their liturgical routine cannot have
differed very much from that of the
French and German monasteries, for
it was still determined by the Regularis
Concordia — the body of common
usages agreed by the English monks
in 970 and modelled on the practices
of Fleury and Ghent. But they dis
played none of the spiritual dynam-
ism that characterised the new
monasticism of the Norman duchy;
and they were apparently indifferent
to the currents of thought and learn-
ing that were transforming the intel-
lectual world of the eleventh century. They were now Subjected to the
invigorating shock of a Norman
take-over. The revival of monastic life
in the Duchy of Normandy had begun
in the year 1001, when the Italian
ascetic William of Volpiano brought
a party of monks from Dijon to restore
Benedictine observance at Fecamp.
William came at the invitation of Duke
Richard ll, and under ducal and baro-
nial patronage the revival was The abbey church
of St Stephen's, Cam, ﬁnmdcd by
William the
Conqueror. extended to other houses. The ancient
abbeys of jumieges, Saint-Wandrille
and Mont-Saint—Michel, were repeo—
pled with monks. And there were
new foundations, among which were
the abbey of Bec started by Herluin,
the convert knight, in 1034, and St
Stephen's at Caen, founded by Duke
William himself only a few years
before the invasion of England. It was
from these centres of young and
dynamic monastic life that the
Conqueror recruited a new race of
abbots who were gradually installed
in the English monasteries. Many of
them came accompanied by groups of
French monks from their own com-
munities. Lanfranc, when he was
brought from ruling St Stephen’s
Caen to take up the archbishopric of
Canterbury in 1070, imported a
number of monks from Caen and Bec
to join the community of Christ
Church Canterbury, including a fel—
low Italian, Henry of Bec, whom in
due course he appointed prior of the
cathedral monastery. This alien invasion was obviously
deeply disturbing for English monks,
who had to accommodate themselves
to a new superior and brethren whose
language they could not understand.
Tension in the cloister was often
heightened by the scant respect that
the new abbots showed for English The norfft new of St Albert's
Abbey — symbol of Norman
’r'mpcrialism' in the Cloister. customs and for the Old English saints. Lanfranc purged the calendar
of Christ Church of all but a handful of Saxon names. At St Alban's his
nephew, Paul of Caen, contemptu-
ously demolished the tombs of his
Saxon predecessors to make way for
new building. The same happened at
St Augustine's Canterbury, where
Abbot Scotland, who had come from
Mont-Saint-Michel, had the entire
complex of churches constructed by
his predecessors levelled to the
ground. The bitterness and sense of
disorientation caused by this insensi-
tive treatment found expression in
various ways. At Christ Church it was
reported that an English monk had
suddenly gone mad. Elsewhere, at St
Augustine's and Glastonbury,
resentment erupted into violence.
Besides infusing new blood into
existing monasteries, the Conquest
was followed by new foundations, for
which the patrons imported monks
from France. The most cons‘picuo us of
these was the Conqueror’s own foun—
dation at Battle — St Martin de Bello i
built, in fulfilment of a vow, upon the
site of King Harold's last stand at
Hastings, and peopled by monks
from Marmoutier in the Touraine. On
a smaller scale, several Norman lords
established priories of a modest size
adjacent to the castle which was their
major residence and the administra-
tive centre of their barony, and per-
suaded monks from home to occupy them. The monks were the spiritual
counterpart of the knights who gar-
risoned the castle. Priory and castle
jointly formed a unit of alien colonisa-
tion in a hostile land. One of the most
influential of these creations was the
Cluniac priory founded by Earl Wil-
liam de Warenne at Lewes in Sussex. Several of the greater French
abbeys had received gifts of land and
churches in England from the grateful
Conquerors; but they showed little
enthusiasm for setting-up dependent
houses in a territory they regarded as
barbarous and unfriendly. St Hugh of
Cluny refused a request from King
William to send monks for English
abbeys on the grounds that super-
vision of a distant overseas depen-
dency would be impossible. But
Hugh‘s reluctance was eventually
overcome by the persistence of Wil-
liam cle Warenne. William and his
English countess, Cunclrada, had vis-
ited Cluny and been deeply impres-
sed; and on returning home they
determined to create a Cluniac priory
near the Earl's castle at Lewes. For
this purpose William donated the newly
built church of Lewes and an endow-
ment big enough to support twelve
monks. Hugh at first demurred, but in
the end he was induced to send a prior
and three monks to start the founda-
tion. At the end of the eleventh century
under the regime of St Hugh, Cluny
was entering on its greatest period
of expansion, and the priory of
St Pancras at Lewes proved to be
only the first of thirty-six houses
which came to constitute the [English Monastic expansion after the Conquest (in e
descending order): Riemqu Abbey; St
Butai‘ph’s Priory at Coicliester; Fountains
Abbey. \l£\R(_ H. Witt: province of the Cluniac empire. They
formed one of the most enduring links
with the monastic world of the conti—
nent. Lewes, which was the largest
and richest of them — in the thirteenth
century its numbers fluctuated bet-
ween fifty and fifty-five monks — came
to have a privileged rank in the order.
lts priors, appointed by the abbot of
Cluny and usually drawn from the
mother‘house, were often men of dis-
tinction. One of them, Hugh of
Anjou, followed his uncle as abbot of
Cluny in .1199, and left his mark on the
order by inaugurating the system of
annual general chapters. In some longestablished com-
munities the Norman take-over, and
the destruction of much that was
familiar and cherished, awoke a quick-
ened interest in the Old English past.
One of the consequences of this was a
revival of monastic life in the North, 29 which had vanished in the course of
the Danish occupation of the ninth
century. Inspired by the cult of St
Cuthbert and Bede's account of the early Northumbrian saints, Aldwin,
the prior of Winchcombe, and two
monks from Evesham set out for the
North in 1073-4 with the purpose of
settling on the derelict sites of Wear-
mouth and Jarrow. The enterprise
prospered. it attracted support from
the northern baronage and the Nor-
man bishops of Durham, and led
within a few years to the re-
foundation of Whitby abbey and new
foundations at Selby and St Mary’s
York. The most eager promoter was
William of St Carilef, the bishop of
Durham. Himself a monk from
Maine, he appreciated the English
tradition of monastic cathedral chap-
ters, and in 1083 he brought monks
from Wearmouth and Jarrow to serve
the cathedral of Durham and assume
custody of the shrine of St Cuthbert.
Like most of the new prelates
imported from France, William was
an energetic builder. His most durable
monument is the massive cathedral
he began erecting on the hill above the
river Wear, which is one of the sup-
reme masterpieces of Norman
Romanesque. its dramatic site and
proximity to the castle bear eloquent
witness to the complementary role of
monks and knights in the Norman
settlement of England. it was a mixture of piety and policy
that moved the king and the new
military aristocracy to donate part of
their property to monasteries. The
primary motive, stated in innumer-
able charters, was that of safe—
guarding the souls of the benefactor 3O Archbishop Lmifrimr
(tell), combined
adrni‘riistiulive vigour
with theological
innovation —
illustrations from his Dorrtfui' (Lil 100}. and his family. To found and endow a
community of monks was to ensure
for the benefactor a perpetual fund of
intercession and merit which would
avail him and his relatives both during
life and after death. It was an act that
rendered satisfaction for the sins of
the donor. The penitentials, with their
elaborate schedule of penances.
inculcated in medieval people a con-
viction that satisfaction in the form of
penance must be rendered to Ljod for
sin. One of the graver sins was home
cide, even if the killing was that of an
enemy in legitimate warfare. The vic-
tors ot' l-"lastings were reminded of this
by a papal legate. Bishop Ermentrid.
who visited England in 1070 and pre-
scribed penances for those who had
fought, with the significant proviso: Anyone who does not know the
number of those he wounded or lulled
must, at the discretion of his bishop, do
penance for one day in each week tor
the remainder of his life; or, if he can. let
him redeem his sin by perpetual aims,
either by building or by endowing a
church.
Penance could be commuted for
specific acts of charity; and foremost
among these was material support to
churches and to monks, who were ex
professo the 'poor of Christ'. It was this
that moved many Norman settlers to
donate land to their monasteries at
home and in some cases to endow
new foundations in lingland.
Besides piety. there were consider—
ations of social convenience and
public policy. The practice of child
oblation, authorised by the Rule of St
Benedict, made monasteries conve~
nient homes for the surplus children
of the landed clasSes and professional ‘De Corpore ct Sanguine £13 SLHENLHE Mfr. families
not be provided with an adequate
inheritance, or daughters for whom
no suitable marriage alliance could be
found. Until the twelfth century,
when opinion veered against it, chil«
dren donated by their parents were a
major source of recruitment to the
Benedictine houses. But alongside
family strategy, there was the ques—
tion of public good. The rulers of
society who gave property to monas-
teries expected temporal as well as
spiritual returns from their invest—
ment. the abbeys and priories of
Norman England, ruled and peopled
by monks from France, were vital
centres of loyalty to the new regime.
As corporate landlords with powers
of seignorial. and in some cases of
public jurisdiction, they were effec-
tively the governors of wide territories
as their Saxon predecessors had been.
Now, under the new dispensation,
the heads of the older abbeys became
tenants of the crown, required to
supply quotas of knights for the royal
host or the garrison of royal castles in
return for their lands. This obligation
of abbots and bishops to provide
knight-service, which had existed in
France and Germany since Caroling-
ian times, was introduced into Eng-
land by the Conqueror. The Norman influx breathed fresh
intellectual life into the English
monasteries. With the new abbots
came the books and learning of the
continent. They also brought the cus-
toms and liturgical usages of Norman
monasticism which were derived
from the practice of Cluny. The con-
stitutions Lanfranc gave to Canter-
bury Cathedral priory, which were
widely copied elsewhere in England,
reproduced the Cluniac customary
with only minor amendments. They
ordained a pattern of community life,
largely inherited from the Carolingian
past, in which liturgical prayer
enriched by elaborate ritual was the vasmt £571. or convert: . n iii? hisavm " mam ON‘IDEM g4 3fhﬂi1uul‘ﬂ: major task of the monk and occupied
the greater part of his day. The man-
ual labour commended by St
Benedict’s Rule had been squeezed
out of the timetable. A proportion of
any monastic community was
occupied in the managerial tasks
involved in running great estates; but
domestic work was done by hired
servants. By the end of the eleventh century,
this traditional form of monastic life
was coming under pressure from new
and disturbing forces. Monastic
leadership in the world of learning
was being challenged by the rising
schools of the seculars in Northern
France and Northern Italy. The age of
the iimgistri i the secular masters — had
begun. Within the monastic world
itself, accepted notions of the mon k’s
vocation were being called in question
by new ascetic movements expressing
dissatisfaction with the prevailing
version of the Benedictine life. The
reaction was partly a protest against
the wealth and worldly involvement
of the great abbeys; partly a rejection
of a regime that imposed a crushing
burden of communal prayer and
liturgical ritual, and made no conces-
sion to the need of the individual for
solitude, private prayer or reflection.
In their quest for disengagement,
simplicity and solitude, the leaders of
the movement, like the Gregorian
Reformers, drew their inspiration
from what they believed to be the
order of the primitive Church. Their
thinking focused upon three models
suggested by Christian antiquity, and
each provided inspiration for new
forms of religious life. The first was the example of the
desert anchorites of Egypt and Pales-
tine, made known through the Lives of
the Fathers and the Conferences of
Cassian. In the eleventh century the
lure of the desert became again a
major factor in Western religious
experience. The ideal of the eremitical
life inspired groups of hermits who
congregated in the mountain regions
of central Italy and in the forests of
Burgundy and Maine, and it found
institutional expression in new religi-
ous orders of an austere kind. The
earliestof these, which began with the
founding of ther hermitage of Carnal-
doli in the Tuscan hills by St Romuald,
never penetrated England. But two
other eremitical orders — the Order of
Grandmont founded by Stephen of
Muret, and the Carthusian Order,
which sprang from St Bruno’s found-
aton of the Grande Chartreuse — made
their appearance on the English scene
in the course of the tWelfth century. Another fertile source of inspiration for new religious institutions was the
idea of ‘the apostolic life', the manner
of life, that is, of the Apostles as
described in chapter 2 ofActs. To the
leaders of the (Liregorian Reform
movement of the eleventh century,
the essence of this appeared to be life
in community, based upon the renun—
ciation of marriage and personal
property. Hildebrand and St Peter
Damian urged that this style of life
was proper to the secular clergy, who
exercised the apostolic role in the
Church. in response to this prop-
aganda, houses of canons regular
began to appear in the eleventh cenA
tury in France, Italy and Germany.
These were communities of clergy. in
some cases cathedral chapters, who
had renounced personal property and
adopted a fully monastic regime of
common dormitory, refectory, and
choral offices. They were a hybrid
order of clerical monks. In the course
of the twelfth century they adopted
the so-called Rule of St Augustine as
their identity card e an exhortatory
treatise on the monastic virtues,
which had originated as a letter
addressed by Augustine to a com-
munity of nuns — gave them a collec-
tive identity. This, being much less lllf-lt lR‘i [UL—b“ detailed than the Rule of St Benedict,
left each establishment latitude to
devise its own regime. The Austin
canons regular were not really an
order, for although some of the grea—
ter houses like Saint-Victor at Paris
and Arrouaise established dependen-
cies, the majority of priories were
autonomous, and followed their own
customary without reference to any
over-riding organisation. Thanks to
enthusiastic promotion by bishops of
the reforming tendency and lay pat-
rons, the number of canons regular
increased rapidly in the last decades
of the eleventh century. The same search for a primitive
model of the religious life moved
other groups to press for a more literal
observance of the Benedictine Rule.
They demanded greater seclusion
from the outside world, a reduction in
liturgical ritual. and a restoration of
manual work to the monks timetable.
Out of these discontents and initia—
tives developed new orders — those of
Tiron, Vallombrosa, Savigny and
Citeaux s all dedicated to reviving
what was believed to be the original
observance of the Rule. Generally the
leaders provided the inspiration, and
it fell to their successors to translate iiiriiiéges Abbey. :2 liciiijficiniy of ducal patronage in Normandy. 31 HISTORY TODAY Benedictine ’fuiidrirririitalisiii' was a growing factor iii the _
ei'eriei-itii-ceritury Canterbury manuscript. (Right) The obituary roll of Lucy, first prime the charisma into new institutions.
The Cistercians, for instance, origi-
nated in the withdrawal of a group of
monks from the abbey of Molesme,
led by their abbot, Robert, in 10%. All
they sought was seclusion and pov-
erty, and their settlement at L'iteaux in
the Burgundian forest was hardly
more than an obscure hermitage until
the arrival of St Bernard with thirty
recruits in [112, In the following three
years, the community sent colonies to
La Ferte, Pontingny and Clairvaux,
and the institution. entered an era of
meteoric expansion. St Bernard was the foremost
apologist and recruiting officer for the
order; and although he was not the
founder, its austere observance and
passionate propaganda bore the
impress of his dominating personal-
ity. A novel feature of the Cistercians,
made necessary by their initial refusal
to accept serfs or the customary
sources of manorial income, was their
use on a scale hitherto unknown of
coiiversi — illiterate lay-brothers
recruited largely from the peasantry e
as a labour force on their estates. But
in the sense that it represented a more
literal interpretation of St Benedict’s
Rule, the Cistercian observance was
unoriginal. What was new was the
articulated constitution of the order
which. as it evolved, was set out in an
updated text of the Carts Caritatis, the
foundation manifesto attributed in its
original form to Stephen Harding. 32 The outcome of this evolution was a
closely co-ordinated federal structure.
Every abbey was made responsible for
superwsing its own daughter houses;
and all abbots were required to
assemble every year at Citeaux in a
general chapter, which was the sup-
reme governing body of the order lhe newly forged territorial and
cultural links with France meant that
England was fully open to the rising
tide of religious innovation from the
continent. The canons regular made
their appearance in England before
the end of the eleventh century. l-‘oss-
iny the earliest foundation was bt
Mary’s, Huntingdon, which owed its
foundation to Eustace, the Norman
sheriff But a close second was a
community of clergy at St Botolph's,
Colchester, who decided to adopt a
monastic regime and borrowed the
customs of the canons of St Quentin at
Beau vais. During the twelfth century,
the enthusmstic patronage of the
Anglo-Norman baronage promoted
many new foundations of canons. In
fact, numbered by their houses, they
came to be the largest order in the
country. There were several reasons for this
success. [he label of Augustinian
canon covered a diversity of obser-
vance and a wide variety of estab«
lishments. "the canons were to be
found not only in priories great and
small, but also serving hospitals,
communities of nuns, the chapels of monastic revival. (Left) St Benedict with monks holding a copy of the Rule, from an
55 of the Benedictine iiuririri‘y at Hedinglimii, Essex. baronial castles and, in the case of
Carlisle, a cathedral church. l‘heir
versatility and the possibility of
founding a religious house with only a
handful of clergy and a correspond-
ingly modest endowment made them
attractive to the lay patron of moder-
ate means, as Well as to parsimonious
princes. The canons thus found pat-
rons among men of the ministerial
class, like Henry 1's minister, Geof-
frey de Clinton, who founded Keni'lA
worth priory, and RanulfGlanvill, the
founder of Butley and Leiston priories
in Suffolk. Butley and Leiston represented two
different forms of canonical life. The
former was a house of black canons,
who followed a moderate monastic
regime and were not averse to accept-
ing pastoral responsibilities. The lat-
ter belonged to the more austere order
of white canons, the Premonstraten-
sians, who traced their origin from St
Norbert's hermitage of Premontre
and modelled their observance on
that of the (,lsterCIans. Like the
Cistercians too, they sought to avoid
secular involvement and chose sec-
luded sites for their settlements.
Many of their houses were quite mode
est in size; so they appealed, like the
black canons, to middling landowners
anXIous to reap the spiritual rewards
of founding an ascetical community.
It was a minor baron of Lincolnshire.
Peter of (soxhill, who brought them to
England in 1143 to people his founda’ tion of Newhouse. By the such end of
the century, twenty~seven houses
had been founded in England. The most conspicuous conquest
made by the new monasticism was
that of the Cistercians. They were
preceded by a few years by the austere
Norman order of Savigny, which
supplied monks for the abbey of Fur—
ness, founded by Stephen of Blois.
But from the 11305 onwards, it was
the white monks of Citeaux, with
their ascetica] reputation and their
aggressive revivalist claims — in St
Bernard’s phase, ’the restorers of lost
religion‘ — who excited the greatest
interest and attracted the most
enthusiastic support of the military
artistocracy in France and England.
The first plantation was made at
Waverley in Surrey in 1128; the
monks were brought from L’Auméne
through the offices of William Giffard,
the bishop of Winchester. But the
greatest impact was made by a com-
munity sent from Clairvaux by St
Bernard at the request of a Yorkshire
baron, Walter L’Espec of Helmsley, in
['132, to found a new abbey at
Rievaulx. By the end of the year, the
example of the monks of Rievaulx had
persuaded a group of dissidents from
St Mary's, York, to seek admission to
the Cistercian order; and their settle—
ment in Skelldale formed the nucleus
of Fountains abbey. Rievaulx proved
to be the harbinger of a wave of
Cistercian settlement in the north of
England. Although they were representaw
tives of a French order, the white
monks quickly established them-
selves as an integral feature of the
English social landscape. Their
activities as cultivators of waste lands
a the consequence of their preference
for secluded sites — and largeescale
producers of wool constitute a well—
known chapter of English economic
history, The native element was
strong from the outset. There were
Yorkshire men at Clairvaux in St Ber-
nard's time, who formed the nucleus
of the party that was sent to settle at
Rievaulx. The order quickly recruited
among the Anglo-Norman nobility
and also, with spectacular success,
among the English peasantry, who
supplied the ceiivcrsi. Ailred of
Rievaulx’s biographer tells us that in
1167 Rievaulx contained 140 choir
monks and 500 lay-brothers. Waver-
ley in the [1805 housed seventy choir
monks and 120 lay-brothers. What
preserved the international dimen-
sion of the order were the constitu—
tional links between English abbeys
and their founding houses overseas,
and annual journeys of English abbots to the general chapter, where they
met continental brethren and brought
back news and instructions from
abroad. These meetings were the only
regular form of international assem-
bly known to medieval Europe. The winds of ascetical revival from
across the Channel touched women
as well as men. The aristocratic order
of Fontevrault owed its English plan-
tation directly to the French connec—
tion, for Fontevrault was the chosen
mausoleum of the Angevin dynasty,
and it was Henry ll who introduced _u J HIM
“L'Hllilfl i to“ t V! )i‘
nebudiridonotor rgii baby‘lomr irrliu ‘d-
(lbft‘dltt‘ﬂm ﬁrmdrmt dﬁr "imam our 11 ~.:
itmn irgrm iiidar—d patron iiaftmim (‘lwrr " ddiithtfpnimrni oi "Iii'tri'l't'timmr indoiini
dﬁﬁii-"rt‘ilnfa Ill‘ 1,5 .ti iiiiiim dictum-1 dn
Tilt-(3012i i‘c‘rulplniz- .. nn‘poitrnumudmi
iiimiimtin iiiiiorltiu'io til.‘ iiiiiTi'rt' d'cltfuin
iir rc‘gio e-trraniiwuimpiirmi iiiiiiiib: nuts:
ummamla drtewi fmmitxrmidimt uni:
111p! mm - ourmfihuruaxr dottm‘ drrnpii
iia - (ruin IJOTTE‘JID liars mpatario rcgrfﬁrr
dorm: mriirruui a-iingimm rtrdirtrmum-
ﬁrtnn ﬂimmnf'ipr tlﬂntﬂtiim pfﬂl‘mllﬂfdlfl
doumﬁmmdcume undr hibrtmr. ipfr «roam-"h mun-r In-u-f unnu- . it \mnr u. Under the inﬂuence of Noriiiiiii elitiots,
libraries were established at major centres,-
(iiliove) the Winchester Bible (c.1160); (below)
the St Athens Psalter (1120—30). - teta-
Vi ;_ - or MWS til: I Lilxi lULJi‘\\ the order to England, It represented a
form of monastic life long since van—
ished the double monastery, consist-
ing of a nunnery ruled by an abbess
and served by an adjoining com mon-
ity of monks. The order had only three
houses in England, but it probably
provided the inspiration for the only
exclusively English religious order to
be created at this period. 'I his was ﬁt
Gilbert’s order of Semprmgham. Liil—
bert founded the first houses to meet
the religious needs ot women, for
whom the new orders made little
provision. He planned to affiliate
them to the Cistercians, but when his
petition was rebuffed by the general
chapter, he adopted something
resembling the l~ontevrault plan, and
created double monasteries of nuns
served by communities of Austin
canons. lly the end of the twelfth
century, Gilbert’s order contained
nine double houses and tour for
canons alone, all of them in bngland,
with a heavy concentration in his
native Lii‘icolnshire. The colonisation by the new orders
reflected the fact that Li‘igland was an
integral part of Latin Christendom.
1 he process was materially assisted
by kings With great continental
dominions and a French—speaking
aristocracy, who continued to look to
France tor their religious and cultural
standards as well as their manners.
But in the monastic world, as in secur
lar society, a process of mutual assimi—
lation or 'aculturation' was taking
place. The Benedictine houses con—
tin ued to receive abbots from French
monasteries under the Norman kings,
but the succession of aliens tailed-off
after the middle of the twelfth cenv
tury. The new orders, after the initial
plantation, quickly recruited heads,
as well as members, of English or
Anglo-Norman birth. By the end of
the century, monastic communities
were normally bislingual in french
and English. ln the Benedictine
abbeys, while a native tradition visue
ally reasserted itself in the great
schools of manuscript painting at
Winchester, Canterbury and Bury St
Edmund’s, the products of theirscrip-
twin and the contents of their libraries
show that the monks shared with their overseas brethren a literary cul—
ture that was common to Western
Christendom. FOR FURTHER READING: C H. Lawrence. Medieval Moiiiisiicisiii. loriiis of
Religious Life in Western tiirope iii Hll' Miiidli' Ages
(Longman. 1984); M D Knowles, lll'i.’ Monastic
Order in Eitgliiiiii (Cambridge Ul1l\L‘l5ll_\' Press,
2nd edition. No.3); Lolm Plait. 'l‘iir' Abbeys nml
l’i'ieries of Medieval Lllglﬂttil lbeck‘c‘r & Warburg,
1984); R.W. Southern, 5! Atlhr'lttl end his Bios
gi'iiplicr (Cambridge University Press. |9h3l 33 ...
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